Saturday, January 06, 2007

Tyrannosaurus Regina

My daughter Anya is 4.5 years old. She likes to have me make line drawings of things and then paint them. Today she wanted a dinosaur.

"Stegosaurus?"

"No, Tyrannosaurus Rex."

I'm no artist, but I did my best, and I was fairly pleased with the result. You know, the strong nose ridge, the gaping jaw filled with long sharp teeth, the massive tail, and the huge talons at the points of the rear feet.

Anya added a crown. "A princess Tyrannosaurus Rex!"

Then she insisted that I add glass slippers.

These things weighed what, ten tons? A great deal of that was the neck and torso musculature necessary to thrash car-sized animals to death. It's hard to overstate how dangerous these things would have been around princes and princesses and folks with chain mail and so forth. The talons on these things could probably punch through an unreinforced driveway.

And then, the glass slipper. The most impractical possible footwear. Like clogs, inflexible. But also prone to shattering, possessing little traction, and probably heavy once made thick enough to be safe. I'm personally certain that the glass slipper concept is due to some sort of mistranslation. But still, how do you apply glass slippers to a Tyrannosaurus?